Onnela Lab

Department of Biostatistics
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Harvard University

Welcome to the Onnela Lab website!

Our lab’s research involves two interrelated research themes. In statistical network science, the study of network representations of physical, biological, and social phenomena, we focus on social and biological networks and their connection to human health. In digital phenotyping, the moment-by-moment quantification of the individual-level human phenotype using data from digital devices, we focus on psychiatric and neurological disorders.

The starting point to the application of our research to public health is the simple premise that people do not exist as isolated units; people are connected, and therefore our health is connected. The group’s ongoing projects deal with topics such as large-scale social networks, network inference, cluster randomized trials, and mental health.

The Principal Investigator JP Onnela (see Faculty page and Google Scholar profile) joined the Department of Biostatistics in November 2011. He was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Medical School, a Fulbright Scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a Junior Research Fellow at Oxford University. He obtained his doctorate at the Helsinki University of Technology in 2006, where his dissertation received the Dissertation of the Year Award from the university. He received the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award in 2013 for the Digital Phenotyping Project (see Research Areas).